Crosslake Fibre to build Canada-US subsea cable via Lake Ontario

09 May 2017 | Jason McGee-Abe

Crosslake Fibre has today announced its plans to build a new subsea fibre-optic cable from Toronto, Canada to Buffalo, New York through Lake Ontario.

The cable will be the first submarine cable system across Lake Ontario to directly connect Toronto and the US. It will have a high fibre count and be physically diverse from other routes between Toronto and Buffalo while being shorter in length, enabling lower latency connectivity between Toronto and other markets in the US.

“We are excited to announce this project publicly as it’s a very unique build,” states Mike Cunningham, chief executive officer of Crosslake Fibre.

“The cable system will help fuel the massive and growing demands for wholesale bandwidth and cloud connectivity in the Greater Toronto Area and the Buffalo Niagara Region.”

Crosslake will own and operate the system as an independent operator, giving the company flexibility to provide innovative commercial solutions to customers. The company will offer dark fibre and managed services to enterprise and carrier customers and ultra-low latency services to financial networks.

The targeted ready-for-service (RFS) date for the cable system is September 2018. “Over the last seven months, we have made tremendous progress on the key aspects of the project, including permitting, sales, and financing,” added Cunningham. “Our approach of partnering with industry-leading firms has positioned Crosslake to execute this project as planned.”